4th of July on Wilcox Farm

My Dad’s birthday is the 3rd of July so that made the 4th even bigger on the farm. I grew up on the ridge overlooking the Harts Lake Valley, almost all of which is part of the farm. Our only neighbors were my Uncle Barrie and Aunt Susan, my Great-Grandparents and my Grandparents and all of us lived in a line of homes where we could see the valley, the cows on pasture, the chicken houses, Harts Lake and of course, the Mountain. We could usually smell the chickens, too.

During the summer, there were always lots of cousins. My younger cousins, Debbie, Brent and Andy of course, next door and then all the rest for weeks at a time. Goldsmith’s, Blunts, Bargreens, Morses, Beekmans, sometimes Mariferns. They came and stayed in one of the houses, often rotating from house to house and eating meals wherever they happened to be at mealtime. Maybe for the adults sometimes there was some strain but for the kids, it was like Shangri-La.

Work was in the background of everything. If you didn’t live it, it’s hard to imagine the work habits that are developed when your family depends on large numbers of livestock to feed you and pay off the debt. In the 60’s we probably had 300 cows and around 300,000 chickens. The work was the same every day and the weekend wasn’t really a factor. Feeding, watering, scraping manure, milking and egg gathering happened every day regardless of conditions, including disasters like the Columbus Day Storm. The animals couldn’t stop; neither could we. I think we probably had around 50 people working on the farm in the late ‘60’s. We all worked together at the same jobs in the same places. Probably the worst ones involved scraping manure in cow and calf barns every day. You guessed it. During the summer that was the job of Chris and I and our cousins. They all knew that the summer on the farm was great, but there was going to be a fair amount of work involved.

I got so excited for the 4th, I always had a stomach-ache. My Grandma Mildred seemed to be in charge unless one of the aggressive Aunts were around. Then there was some chain-of-command uncertainty. My grandfather had three older sisters who grew up on the farm and all graduated from college during the Depression, married and raised families. They were damned determined women, like a lot of farm-raised people in those days.

Of course breakfast on the farm was bacon and eggs! There’d be four moms in 4 houses all cooking the same thing with cousins jumbled in at whatever houses they ended up at. Sleeping-in was NOT an option, but I’m pretty sure most parents didn’t have a clue which house their kids were at in any given moment. They knew the only worries though, were the typical discounted ones of getting run over by a cow or horse, falling into the manure, or losing your boots in the deep, cold mud of the valley pasture. No one spent a bit of time worrying about leaving kids with people who worked on the farm. Without exception, over a lifetime, I’ve never had a bad experience with people on the farm and kids.

Grandma Mildred must have had 20 long red-and-white checked table cloths and a matching number of serving tables and picnic tables. She usually lined them all up in the field between the pool and the old fire hall. Yeah, we actually had a volunteer fire-station on the farm. The kids even went to the fires...And the pool was a little comical. It was actually a cement pond. Round with a sloping bottom, like a sno-cone cup. It was really rough cement, too. We always had sore feet.

I don’t really remember the food. I think the kids were all way too busy skylarking to worry about the food, but there was also a lot of paranoia about it. Grandma was fanatically convinced that if you went swimming within an hour of eating, you would get cramps and drown. I think the Red Cross told her that. I hated the Red Cross. Whatever the food was, I am sure that it had a lot of hamburger in it. None of us knew what a good steak tasted like. We had freezers full of old holstein milk cows who broke their legs and that’s what we ate.

Grandpa Truman always made ice cream, though. An old hand-crank machine and everyone would trade off cranking it. It wasn’t lo-cal, either. Our cream was skimmed right off the top of the big gallon pickle jars that we filled out of the bulk milk tank at the dairy. Grandma always had lots of raspberries with the ice cream. She had a big raspberry patch beside her house.

There was always a big pack of dogs wandering around looking for scraps. Probably half the little kids hardly knew the difference between puppies and cousins. They were all just as happy to play the same kinds of games. Sometimes we’d have the horses saddled up, too. I;’m pretty sure every cousin got tossed off a horse on the farm at least once.

We were really, really frugal, on the farm in the ‘60’s. We had been through a financial crisis that almost cost us the farm. We were enthusiastic members of a large, regional agricultural cooperative called Western Farmers. In fact, we were so enthusiastic that we were the largest bond-holders. When that cooperative crashed, it almost took us with it and a good part of the ‘60’s was spent working out of that financial hole. All of us have been a little skeptical of cooperatives ever since...

Of course to a kid, the 4th is only about the fireworks. It’s torture to live in the northern US on the 4th, especially when you get up at the crack of dawn. It takes forever to get dark enough for fireworks. They were always a huge disappointment. We were too frugal to spend much money on them and this was before they sold fireworks on the Nisqually reservation. The safe and sane fireworks of the ‘60’s broke a lot of childish hearts with their meager little fizzles and hisses. Everyone went to bed pretty early on the farm. Inevitably the Dads would start lighting the little fizzlers before it was very dark and work their way up to the pathetic highlights of Piccolo Pete’s. Then they’d round up the kids and pitch them into the most convenient bed. The next day had just about at much work and was just as great.

When you think about it, this all seems like something out of Norman Rockwell, but that would be wrong. This is what inspired Norman.